Who is to blame for the state of the nation? Mitt Romney.

Iblame Mitt Romney, I really do. If the former Massachusetts governor had won the eminently winnable 2012 presidential election against Barack Obama, none of this would have happened: No Trump, no MAGA, no decade-long, racism-infused, faux-populist nightmare from which much of the nation is trying to awake.

Romney’s new book, essentially a collaboration with journalist McKay Coppins of The Atlantic, reveals what an embarrassing clown show his 2012 campaign was. A smart former consultant himself — Romney was a cofounder of Bain Capital, the equity arm of the company known as “the KGB of management consulting” — he waxed reluctant to take his own consultants’ advice and attack Obama, hard.

“We could run ads about [Obama’s friend, cofounder of the Weather Underground] Bill Ayres, Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright [Obama’s controversial former pastor], and cocaine use,” Romney wrote in his journal, “but that would … be inconsistent with the need for an honest debate about the nation’s challenges,” blah, blah, blah.

Across the aisle, as it were, the Obama campaign wasn’t exactly feeling the need for an honest debate about the nation’s challenges. The president’s stimulus plan had barely dented the effects of the Great Recession. The unemployment rate had declined from its 2009 peak of 10 percent but still hovered around 8 percent. “We knew that we probably wouldn’t win a race [about] who had the expertise to manage the economy,” Obama’s media Svengali David Axelrod later told Coppins.

So instead the Democrats successfully portrayed Romney as a soulless corporate raider — “Robin Hood in reverse,” Obama called him — and all-around villain. One anti-Romney ad produced by a Democratic political action committee spotlighted a widower whose wife died after he lost his job at a Bain-owned factory. “I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to anyone,” the man said.

Then-Obama campaign spokesperson

Jen Psaki later backed away from the ad, claiming, “We don’t have any knowledge of the story of the family.”

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada insisted, falsely, that his fellow Mormon Romney “has not paid any taxes for 10 years.” (Ensuing Washington Post headline: “Harry Reid lied about Mitt Romney’s taxes. He’s still not sorry.”) Then-vice president Joe Biden told a predominantly Black audience in Virginia that “Romney wants to let the — he said in the first hundred days he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, ‘unchain Wall Street.’ They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”

While Obama & Co. hammered away at Romney’s character and exaggerated his dopey gaffes, e.g., his “binders full of women” malapropism at the second presidential debate, the GOP nominee waged what Politico Magazine called “the smallest campaign ever.” Romney worsened his dwindling chances for election by telling a roomful of Florida fat cats that Obama’s voting base consisted of “victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.”

How unsurprising that, in the middle of the campaign, the profanity-averse Romney confided to his journal: “Dang. Why do I have no message yet?!”

Spoiler alert: I voted for him; he lost, pretty badly, 332-206 in the Electoral College, pulling 47.2 percent of the national vote, compared with Obama’s 51.1 percent.

You can never prove a counterfactual argument, so how do I know that a four-yearlong, conservative centrist Romney presidency would have forestalled the rise of Trump? Here is my theory: With Romney in the White House and the House of Representatives under GOP control (the Senate would flip Republican in 2016) some legislative progress might have been reasonable to expect, possibly even preventing the emergence of the Freedom Caucus wreckers, who coalesced after the 2014 election.

It’s possible to believe — I’m a cockeyed optimist — that Romney could have won a second term in 2016, or, alternatively, lost to Hillary Clinton. Either way, Donald Trump, whom Romney unwisely embraced in 2012 (“No veneer, the real deal,” Romney wrote of Trump in his journal. “Got to love him.”) becomes a footnote to history, a shady hotelier with unfulfilled political ambitions.

A man can dream, can’t he?

You can never prove a counterfactual argument, so how do I know that a four-year-long, conservative centrist Romney presidency would have forestalled the rise of Trump?